Mise-en-scene

When films speak French

Paris in spring is a place for romance, but what of the City of Light in the dark of winter? Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places) is
a bittersweet romance of overlapping couples and couplings, a drama
flecked with humor. Snow is always falling outside and everyone’s
overcoat is powdered in white. The action takes place entirely indoors.

Private Fears in Public Places will be shown at 9:30
p.m., Feb. 8, and 2:30 p.m., Feb. 9, as part of the 2008 Festival of
Films in French. The annual festival runs Feb. 8-17 at the UW-Milwaukee
Union Theatre. The director of Private Fears, Alain Resnais, is
considered one of the great figures to emerge from the French New Wave
movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Perhaps more than any of his
colleagues, he tested the boundaries of cinema with such hallmarks of
ambiguity as Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

With
their complex construction of flashbacks and fusion of past and
present, memory and subjectivity, almost anything he directed afterward
has been accessible, even conventional, by contrast. Private Fears is
arranged like a sequence of theater set pieces in the apartments,
workplaces and meeting places of its characters. The stylish
mise-en-scene is important, but conversation is king.

Private Fears concerns
the distances and connections between an ensemble of essentially lonely
people moving quietly in overlapping circles, like a Robert Altman cast
in soft shoes. There is the professional woman, frustrated by her
layabout fiance. There is the elderly real estate agent wondering
erotically about the devoutly Catholic receptionist in his office. He
lives with his much younger sister who waits in cafes for the Internet
blind dates that seldom present themselves. There is the hotel
bartender, listening to the layabout fiance with composed attention,
who hires the receptionist as an evening caregiver for his father, who
has slipped into hostile senility.

Resnais has shaped an
elegant two hours of theater on film, a series of character sketches
drawn with hope but given no resolution. The Festival of Films in
French isn’t only about lovelorn Parisians, but also showcases a
variety of movies from the Frenchspeaking world. Included are the
fast-paced historical drama Maurice Richard: The Rocket, about a National Hockey League star from Quebec who escaped poverty by mastering the rough sport (7 p.m., Feb. 8, and 9 p.m.,
Feb. 9); an evening of New French Experimental Cinema (7 p.m., Feb. 12); Bamako, an indictment of World Bank policies in Africa (7 p.m., Feb. 16, and 5:30 p.m., Feb. 17); and classics such as Belle de jour (5 p.m. Feb. 9 and Feb. 10).